August 30, 2023

I share with many ex-liberals a conversion story that is one of increasing rancor against liberalism. Since I hit my adulthood in the 1990s, the occasions are those of the Bush I, Clinton, and early Bush II era — the unresisted fatwa against Salman Rushdie, monolithic Democratic support for Slick Willie during his impeachment trial, and, above all, 9/11, and the Democratic unwillingness even to say that we had Muslim enemies. The last is somewhat ironic, since I am now a considerably more isolationist conservative, but I did begin as a fairly neocon one. The usual ironies of life.

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But these conversion stories are not really adequate — or, worse, speak of inadequate conservatives. If your only reason to be conservative is the inadequacy of liberalism, you are only a spurned lover, an ex-liberal yearning for some liberalism of yore. A proper conservative ought to have some positive reason to be a conservative — something more than a list of complaints that reveals you are ultimately still in love with liberalism.

As for me — it starts not so much with a set of beliefs, as with affections. I grew up liking an awful lot of America, and the bits and pieces I learned about what we more formally call western civilization. I read children’s histories about Franklin and Washington and Jackson, and Douglass and Tubman and Chavez, that made you think this was a good country. I saw movies and short cartoons that made America seem just plain fun — The Gold Rush, Casablanca, Bugs Bunny cartoons, North by Northwest, Airplane. Now and then I went to funny old plays, Scapin the Schemer and The Importance of Being Earnest, and I learned that you could laugh at the classic too.

And I liked the New York City I grew up in, grungy and crime-ridden as it was. There was a Chock-Full-O-Nuts up on Broadway where grown-ups drank a cuppa joe, not these foofaraw lattes, a local drugstore where I bought comics and a local bookstore where I bought science fiction, and Riverside Park filled with playgrounds and speedways for bicycles, and drives up to New England where it was green and lush in summer and gorgeous red and orange in fall, snow enough in the city to sled on in winter, for the Bicentennial I saw the Tall Ships sail up the Hudson, and when I went down to the World Trade Center, right up next to it, I looked up and I couldn’t see the top. Even when there was no heat in our apartment building, it meant the family all came together to eat dinner in the warmest bedroom, huddled in blankets. I lived in a good city and a good country and I was happy in them.

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Still, I also always had a sense, things were different once. My parents had me late, so I grew up knowing how the world looked to people who had become adults before the 1960s. No Kennedy-latry — we’d rather have had Averell Harriman, and Johnson did far more for Civil Rights. No dewy-eyed hallelujahs about the 1960s and the hippies and rock music — and weary memories that student protests at Hunter College meant my mom had to climb ten flights of stairs when the elevator power went out. No ignorant hatred of religion. My dad was (and is) an anti-communist liberal from before the 1960s change, so I knew from him how much liberalism and the Democratic party had changed. But above all, I simply got a sense from them of what it was like when everyone still wore shirts and ties, when you went to the opera instead of the rock concert, of all the world that had come crashing into ruins about 1968. And while I was and am a creature of my times with no urge to wear a shirt and tie myself, I grew up thinking things were different once — and better.

And farther back, in the older generation — I saw and heard people who were truly educated. I have had the good fortune in my youth to meet, however briefly, people such as Gregory Rabassa and Diana Trilling. But the most indelible impression was Paul and Edith Kristeller, friends of my grandfather, refugees from Nazi Germany, who had been educated in Germany before 1933. There were others like them — I once was at a dinner party where six different guests told about their escapes from Hitler’s Europe. But it was the Kristellers most of all — Paul spoke six languages, and his accented but grammatically perfect English was probably one of the weakest. Edith always looked to make sure the Christmas tree was as well decorated in the back as in the front. I saw before me survivors not just of the 1968 deluge, but of the earlier deluge that had wrecked Europe — the erudite, the civilized products and incarnations of Western civilization at its best. I could judge the world around me by at least an echo of the German intellectual world, as it had been two generations before I was born.

So I fell in love with a great deal of the past and the present, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. And to be a conservative, that just means that I cared more to keep what I loved than to change it for some new fancy.

Something more was needed, though. I did start out a liberal, thinking I could square these affections with the ideals and policies of the Left. And there was that disillusion between 1989 and 2001. It didn’t hurt that as I read the conservative magazines of the 1990s, they seemed more alive and full of interesting debate than did the magazines of the Left, which (then as now) largely argued Do we do X now or wait a bit until the time is right? It was telling to me that the happily schizophrenic magazine of Marty Peretz, The New Republic, struck far heavier blows against the Left than against the Right.

The intellectual world of conservatism just seemed more capacious and more fun — John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher, after all, did not remotely believe the same things, and a movement that praised both was sure to have interesting discussions and donnybrooks. Liberalism, by contrast, seemed worse than wrong — it was boring. The conservative world may be the weaker politically because its adherents disagree on fundamental matters, but it is intellectually far more engaging.

I became a conservative after 9/11, and the liberal incapacity to face that event squarely really was the occasion for saying I am no longer a liberal. But it crystallized a deeper conviction: liberals and the Left are at best indifferent to what I love and want to sweep much of it away. The different conservative beliefs are arguments about what particularly to preserve, and what tactics to use to preserve them. But the fundamental conservative conviction is, I want to keep what I love more than I want to change the world. 9/11 made me realize that was what I believed, but I’d been accumulating things to love all my life.